Templar Edification

This month, I’d like to make a book recommendation. Consider it a home-stretch supplement to your summer reading list. I’ve known of Malcolm Guite (pronounced like “kite”) for some years now. An Anglican priest and poet, he’s been the featured speaker for the Canadian Rockies Theological Conference, which several of my Order—the Society of the Holy Trinity—have attended and enjoyed. I own some of his books of liturgical poetry, and often share his sonnets online, especially for Michaelmas. This year saw the release of the Rev’d Guite’s magnum opus, an Arthuriad entitled Merlin’s Isle. Rabbit Room Press published the first of its four volumes, Galahad and the Grail, in April, with a second tome, The Coming of Arthur, due out in November. The action starts in media res, with the arrival of the Grail Knight, the achievement of the Holy Grail, and the subsequent healing of the Fisher-King and his Wasteland kingdom. Rev’d Guite retells the tale in epic English ballad form, which he requests...

I saw a post online the other day, which claimed that 49% of Minnesotans—less than half—say that they believe in God. Now, I don’t put much weight behind such polls, however they gather their data. I remember reading recently that 30% of self-identified atheists also affirm that they believe in God. Try to make that one make sense. But the very notion of “believing in God” is something of a category error, a confusion of terms. Most people who deny belief in God are thinking of a god; that is, of a powerful yet limited supernatural or spiritual creature of some sort, akin to what Jews and Christians might call angels, or even fae. Yet God is not a god. God, in the classical sense—as understood by the great monotheisms, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Baháʼí, Zoroastrians, Platonists, and, I would argue, certain strains of Buddhism—is not a part of Creation, not a being within the universe, not even properly an object of belief; because God is not an object, not a th...

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to  them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his  understanding and his answers. -Luke 2:46-47 There is a sense in which the Gospels were written backwards. New Testament scholars refer to “the messianic secret,” the notion, firmly established in the text, that Jesus’ nature and identity are fully revealed only in the Resurrection. Before that He is misunderstood and misapprehended, even by those closest to Him: His Apostles, His Mother, His brothers and His sisters. Easter unveils Him not only as Christ and King but as the Word made flesh, God Himself incarnate. The paschal mystery illuminates all: all that went before, and all to follow after. The earliest Christian confession was the amazed and breathless cry, “Christ is Lord!”—with full understanding that Lord, κύριος, is the established Hellenistic euphemism for the Hebrew Name of God. The Resurrection is the b...